Prerna's Reviews > The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

If you plan on reading this book, buckle up kids. Because the authors here are going to completely overturn the very premise of all your history lessons. It was quite a blow to me frankly, given that most feminist studies begin with associations between the origins of private property, patriarchy and monogamy. And this book clearly shows that such an association is extremely reductive, because the notion of private property is as old as that of sacredness. The authors seem to be of the opinion that the obsession with property rights as the basis of society is a peculiarly western phenomenon. What we should be asking instead is why these notions grew to order and dictate so many other aspects of human affairs. Moreover, the authors argue that what we now regard as a 'state' hasn't been a constant of history (even recent history) even though many researchers seem to be tirelessly looking for its origins in many different periods.

Much of this book is marked by uncertainty (which is my favorite concept, proven by the fact that my research area is quantum physics) as to whether we can neatly draw lines and separate history into clear cut periods as most textbooks seem to do. The authors express deep uncertainty as to whether what we think of as 'civilization' and 'state' are even conjoined elements. They claim that contrary to popular opinion, 'civilization' hasn't been handed down to us through an evolutionary process. It is silly to even talk about the evolution of human society from band to tribe to chiefdom to state, when our starting points are groups that moved fluidly between these forms of social organisation as a matter of habitat.

Apparently, we've been asking all the wrong questions and ridiculously confining ourselves to the Rousseau-Hobbes debate on the origins of inequality. As if there ever was a distinct origin. As if it is either inherent to human nature or to the nature of civilization. The authors even scorn the leftist upholding of the Rousseau argument, because it is downright silly to assume humans ever lived in idyllic garden of Eden sort of communities. For them, questions regarding the origin of state and the question about origins of inequality are equally foolish.

What are the lessons we can learn from history then? What are the right questions to ask? For starters, we need to question why after millenia of constructing and disassembling forms of heirarchy, did we allow permanent and intractable system of inequality to take root? I, for one, am more than happy to jump on this bandwagon.

This is an extremely bold book, in the truest sense of the word. Oh and I'm totally into all the Yuval Noah Harari and Jared Diamond dissing.

If there is a particular story we should be telling, a big question we should be asking of human history (instead of the ‘origins of social inequality’), is it precisely this: how did we find ourselves stuck in just one form of social reality, and how did relations based ultimately on violence and domination come to be normalized within it?